A 37-year-old wanting to learn computer science

What I took away from your post was not that you want to learn computer science but that you want to build things with software. If so, now is a really exciting time because it's never been easier for people without a CS background to go from idea to working software.

As a UX designer, I've worked with developers for a long time, so I've picked up knowledge along the way. I've read some books and merged some PRs at work but nothing that would qualify me as a developer.

What am I'm having a lot fun with right now though is building with LLMs. If I have an idea, I'll just throw it into Replit or Claude Code to see what it comes up with and then decide if I want to pursue it further.

My 2 cents: learn by building. Start working down your list of ideas and dig deeper into questions and topics that come up. Will probably keep things more interesting than slogging through a course.

> If so, now is a really exciting time because it's never been easier for people without a CS background to go from idea to working software.

If this means to "learn" by using a LLM, I would be so wary of that advice.

Not learning CS was a shortcut many people took. Sometimes lack of time (ie: they haven't learned it yet), sometimes a lack of will. Either way, I feel that CS fundamentals is like a car mechanic knowing how an engine works. Tends to make for a better mechanic.

This helps with building, but how does it help with the learning? You don't understand how it was built, how it works out how to change our support it without an LLM. this is a very specific, narrow way of building.

That's fair. It depends on the goal. I'm not trying to change careers. And I didn't get that sense from original poster. I'm mostly interested in prototyping or addressing niche productivity issues. But I feel I learn quite a bit from seeing what the LLM does and asking follow up questions or looking things up. I've been around software dev a lot so that helps with knowing what to ask sometimes. My main point is if someone is interested in building software, they should start building as soon as possible. Don't feel you have learn everything first.